The Ancient Mediterranean MOD

[Drogear]

Any ETA for 1.9?

BTW Now over 2000 posts at this treath, for sure one of the most popular mods to date

 

[Hypnotoad]

Sorry, I messed something up in my original posts which obscured my point (I got the name of the difficulty levels messed up):

Normally I play on Immortal and win a cultural victory by around 1700. Here I was playing on Emperor (two levels lower) and won much nearer to the end (426/500).

I like the idea of the silk road. It was well established by 1 AD, so I would think the feat would be to gain control of the silk road (diplomatically) or send an ambassador or some such.

-- David

 

[thamis]

Any ETA for 1.9?

BTW Now over 2000 posts at this treath, for sure one of the most popular mods to date

Well, if we go by post count and thread views on CivFanatics, it's mod #2 after Fall from Heaven!

1.9 is coming soon. We're testing it, but there are still some bugs with the SDK. If we can't fix them any time soon, we'll leave out some amazing new SDK features and put them into 2.0.

 

[Karhgath]

What kind of bugs do you have? Maybe I can help.

I'm free tonight and tomorrow if you want me to take a look.

 

[Ankenaton]

I'd just like to take a break from my busy schedule to congratulates you guys, TAM has grown quite a bit. Awesome job! I unfortunately don't have much time anymore to help out, but I still find time to play TAM a bit here and there =) I have a small list of ideas/balance changes, I'll try to post them soon since I'll be on vacation in 2 weeks and I hope to have some free time then.

Congrats again everyone.

Good to see your post Karhgath. Hope to see some of your creativity blossom over on TAM IV in a couple of weeks.

 

[Karhgath]

Thanks, I hope to help out as much as I can. My 'creativity' usually comes in bursts every 3-4 months, hehe, and only some of it is useful, but oh well. Hope that some will be of use this time around.

This time, topics include:
Exploration and discovery
Barbarian spread and behavior
AI/Diplomacy/Trade
Basic ancient warfare
Units balance and promotions
Copper, bronze, iron, oh my!
My Huge map/map balance

Maybe i'll touch on religions but I know they are working hard on it right now so...

Here's the set of problems/issues that I'll address (some might be fixed in 1.9). I'll post my ideas and suggestions in a few days, giving everyone time discuss those issues a bit =)

1) Too much units. Yeah, I created the unit tree but when you play you have like 12 different units you can build after a while, plus 8 naval units(ok, ok, not that much =), that's a bit excessive. We can probably streamline the units without removing any flavour and fun. I'm not talking about an overhaul becuase it's quite balance, especially with the recent changes(javeliners for example).

2) Have warfare evolve with new strategies and tactics. Early warfare is quite different from late roman warfare, and it's not just about having more powerful units. Promotions should reflect that.

3) Early on, if you can get past the barbs, you can explore and meet a lot of civs easily. Quite unrealistic. Scouts/explorers/etc. are usually not that great/useful(except for 2 moves) in civ and TAM is no exception. Knowing too much people means that map/tech exchange becomes too powerful, too fast. Exploring should require efforts.

4) No diplomatic options early on. "Hi there. Sorry, but I'm not advanced enough to talk to you. Good bye."

5) Some civs must constantly deal with barbs and not others. It's realistic but not quite balanced at the same time. Play carthage and get all of your units to 10xp without a sweat, or try to keep your border sage by spending half of your tresury to protect your borders even when playing peacefully.

6) Sea is not important enough. It's The Ancient Mediterranean afterall =) To counter point 3, phoenician were importing tin from england early on, so establishing a naval trade network should be easy... no so much for a land network/exploration. Protecting that is also important.

7) After extensive research, I finally got a good idea how to implement copper/bronze/iron. Right now it takes a lot of micromanagement, you don't know what you're getting intuitively, etc. Smithy is a great idea tho, but it's far from perfect. BTW, before early steel, iron was crap, but it was plentiful and easy to forge compared to Bronze, which was still the material used for the rich and powerful.

8) I think I'll finish the huge map I started way back =) Yay me?

9) As for religions... Religions weren't that important back then. What I mean is that, with some exceptions, and until christianism, holy wars and religious wars weren't that common. Sure, every civs had different religions, but most frictions came from other issues. Culture (which could include religion, but also much more) was a lot more important. Alexander's conquests and the spread of greek culture is quite important. Same for Roman culture, Mesopotamic culture, etc. Right now, as in Civ4, religions are the main argument for wars between civs, as they affect relations the most. Culture, borders, resources and conquest should be the main argument for wars in the ancient era, not religion. Too much emphasis is put on religions right now.

Not to put down your awesome work there tho, just my humble opinion as usual. =)

 

[thamis]

You got some good suggestions here. Take a look at 1.9 (which is basically finalized, we won't change it) and adjust your suggestions from that. I don't want to remove units, but we've balanced them out much better in 1.9!

 

[Hypnotoad]

I want to strongly agree with Karhgath's point #6 -- the sea is not nearly important enough. If you look at Greek and Phonecian settling patterns, it was almost all by sea. Right now the Mediteranian is likely to be colonized before you build a boat. Also sea trade isn't important enough unless you build the Great Lighthouse. Sea trade was a cornerstone of Greek dominance culturally, intellectually, financially (and one too often overlooked).

So some ideas:

First, the cool idea that I have no idea if it is doable: could you make a unit that moves both over water and land? If so, I think it would be really cool to make a settler unit that moves over water (ideally, much faster over water than land).

A simpler idea would be to give just a few civilizations (Greece and Phonecia, at least) some sort of transport ship to start.

As for increasing the importance of trade along sea routes: perhaps the port should be increased to +100 trade. You would want to decrease the general amount of trade generated from cities so this doesn't speed up tech development even more. Or perhaps sea-cities should be able to build something that increases there number of trade routes....

-- Hypnotoad

 

[Maniac]

2) Have warfare evolve with new strategies and tactics. Early warfare is quite different from late roman warfare, and it's not just about having more powerful units. Promotions should reflect that.

I have some ideas for that, but it would require rewriting the tech tree from scratch, so I haven't proposed them.

3) Early on, if you can get past the barbs, you can explore and meet a lot of civs easily. Quite unrealistic. Scouts/explorers/etc. are usually not that great/useful(except for 2 moves) in civ and TAM is no exception. Knowing too much people means that map/tech exchange becomes too powerful, too fast. Exploring should require efforts.

To make exploration harder, you could give units eg a -20% healing rate in neutral territory. And give explorers +30% healing rate in neutral territory.
Of course you can't really give units a negative healing rate in enemy territory as that would make warfare more or less impossible. So there's still the problem of exploring the territory of civs you have open borders with. I think the only solution here is with the SDK. Change the open borders agreement to a simple trade agreement that doesn't allow unit passage (except for merchant ships).

As for tech exchange, there's the idea of removing tech trade and replacing it by tech bonuses with open borders. Eg it would be neat if you could get a +10% research bonus for every civ you have an open borders agreement with and which already has the tech you're researching.

4) No diplomatic options early on.

Isn't that already the case at the start?

9) As for religions... Religions weren't that important back then. What I mean is that, with some exceptions, and until christianism, holy wars and religious wars weren't that common. Sure, every civs had different religions, but most frictions came from other issues. Culture (which could include religion, but also much more) was a lot more important.

Wasn't culture more a way to increase the stability of your own empire than a source of friction between empires though?

 

[Ankenaton]

Balancing sea trade so that it is more important is an excellent idea. Also the complete far too early exploration of the entire map is a huge problem. As it stands now Civ IV punishes you if you expand too fast (especially early on); but if you do not then the A.I. civilizations take up all of the arable land pretty early on. Religions are way too important, that is prior to the conquest of cities/provinces. Afterwards, many a ruler wanted and attempted to convert a significant amount of the conquered populations so as to blunt the inevitable uprising against a foreign power. I do not know if this aspect can be simulated effectively.

 

[Maniac]

As it stands now Civ IV punishes you if you expand too fast (especially early on); but if you do not then the A.I. civilizations take up all of the arable land pretty early on.

That can be fixed easily. Remove number of cities city maintenance. IMO that concept is one of Civ4's worst ideas and a really crappy way to counter ICS.

To prevent ICS, triple distance city maintenance or so. But instead of one building (court) that halves city maintenance, include several buildings and techs that each decrease maintenance a little. The result being that at the start of the game you can still only have a small empire, but as the game progresses and you advance, your empire can gradually grow and it can actually be economically profitable to conquer the entire map by the end of the game.

 

[thamis]

Regarding diplomacy and religion:

I think the way Shqype reworked the diplomacy, religion now plays a less important role. Only Christianity is highly important.

Regarding city maintenance:

Well, I think we shouldn't change the dynamics of the original game too much. We can look into it, and try it out, but not in a public release. And everything that goes public has priority.

Sea trade:

We've rebalanced trade building effects in 1.9. Let's see how that plays out. Otherwise, I agree that we should make the sea much more important.

Exploration:

I think the best way to deal with it is to increase the level of barbs. Early explorers thus get killed off quickly. At the same time, though, a good player can exploit this and expand very quickly by conquering barb cities. Not sure what to do here.

 

[samari_tycoon]

Oh I got a little sugestion. When looking at the Golden age of the roman empire I saw that a lot of it clung to the Mediterranean. I think besides from the benifets of trade by sea, it was also easyer to manage the empire that way, so maybe you could make a small maintance reduction from harbors and such, this would be easy to add and it would further encorage biulding by the coast.

 

[Ankenaton]

That can be fixed easily. Remove number of cities city maintenance. IMO that concept is one of Civ4's worst ideas and a really crappy way to counter ICS.

To prevent ICS, triple distance city maintenance or so. But instead of one building (court) that halves city maintenance, include several buildings and techs that each decrease maintenance a little. The result being that at the start of the game you can still only have a small empire, but as the game progresses and you advance, your empire can gradually grow and it can actually be economically profitable to conquer the entire map by the end of the game.

Thanks for the fix.

 

[Ankenaton]

Regarding diplomacy and religion:

I think the way Shqype reworked the diplomacy, religion now plays a less important role. Only Christianity is highly important.

Regarding city maintenance:

Well, I think we shouldn't change the dynamics of the original game too much. We can look into it, and try it out, but not in a public release. And everything that goes public has priority.

Sea trade:

We've rebalanced trade building effects in 1.9. Let's see how that plays out. Otherwise, I agree that we should make the sea much more important.

Exploration:

I think the best way to deal with it is to increase the level of barbs. Early explorers thus get killed off quickly. At the same time, though, a good player can exploit this and expand very quickly by conquering barb cities. Not sure what to do here.

You are right! One of the first things I attempt to do is to locate 2 or 3 of the nearest Barb cities and go a conquering

 

[sapon]

Exploration:

I think the best way to deal with it is to increase the level of barbs. Early explorers thus get killed off quickly. At the same time, though, a good player can exploit this and expand very quickly by conquering barb cities. Not sure what to do here.

Thamis, might I suggest fortifying the barbarian cities with a unique unit that has movement of 0 (possible)? This unit would be soley for defense and would be comparable to mid game units.

An easier method is to fortify the cities with an early unit that has maxed out city defense, healing and a few other goodies. I tried this in the European Mod and it worked to keep the barbarian cities unconquered for quite awhile.

 

[Hypnotoad]

Having the barbarian cities to capture is nice. But actually I find them, if anything, a bit harder to capture than the other 14 early Civ home-cities. I found playing as the Greeks, the Phonecians and the Babylonians, it is fairly easy to go and capture your neighbor's home city. Often you catch a newly-minted settler, giving you a free worker too (and sometimes the city you capture founded a religion). Of course, one major advantage to this strategy is that it gives you more room to expand, since you have one fewer opponent to share land with.

I've recently been trying to play as Carthage, and I've found that not having a neighbor's city to steal is a real set-back. The Barbarian cities are nice, but get founded later and actually tend to be better defended.

So, I guess, my point is that if you beef up the barbarian cities, you should beef up the Civs cities, too. I think it would be odd if it were much harder to take a barbarian city than it is to wipe out a nascent civilization.

-- Hypnotoad

 

[Sword Dancer]

We'll be creating the Silk Road, such as in TAM Civ3. In order to win, you have to build caravans that discover a certain section of the silk road. Once you have them all, you can "launch" your great caravan.

One thing that bugged me in TAM for Civ III was that you could build each of the Silk Road sections in *any* order. This meant that you could 'know' a portion of the route that you didn't know how to get to from either direction.

Will this be addressed in this version of TAM so that they have to be built in order?

 

[thamis]

One thing that bugged me in TAM for Civ III was that you could build each of the Silk Road sections in *any* order. This meant that you could 'know' a portion of the route that you didn't know how to get to from either direction.

Will this be addressed in this version of TAM so that they have to be built in order?

Good thought. It should be possible to have one building require the other. That way, only one city can work on sending a caravan.

An easier method would be to obtain different things needed for a caravan: Maps, guides, camels, water, food... Once you got them all, you can send your caravan off. Suggestions?

 

[Elhoim]

It would be nice that you must wait for the caravan to reach it´s destination, like in Civ 2 with the spaceship.